girls:
218 births since 1905
#5498 (4th percentile)
boys:
35.8k births since 1880
#598 (87th percentile)
overall:
36k births since 1880
#1318 (83rd percentile)
The name Dexter is the #1,318 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 36,037 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 83.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 83.0% of all names). For boys, it ranks #598 (87.0% percentile) for all time with 35,819 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,498 (3.8% percentile) for all time with 218 births since 1905.
Dexter has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1905 for girls). Birth data for Dexter is available in 140 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (140 years for boys and 31 years for girls). The Social Security Administration only reports birth data for years in which the name was given to at least five children of the same gender.
The name Dexter has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.4% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Dexter reached its peak popularity in 2012, achieving the 62.0% percentile (ranked #343) with 415 births per million. The name was most common in 1968, with 429 births per million (ranked 60.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2015, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Dexter ranks #565 for boys (38.0% percentile) with 206 births per million, which is 48.2% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Dexter reached its peak popularity in 1923, achieving the 1.8% percentile (ranked #599) with 13 births per million. The name was most common in 1907, with 18 births per million (ranked 0.3% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1988.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Dexter".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Dexter.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Dexter", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Dexter.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Dexter. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Dexter is pronounced as DEHK-ster, which has 2 syllables.
If none of the pronunciations above sound right to you, could you please check whether any of these related pronunciations should be applied to the name Dexter? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Dexter. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Dexter, please vote using the thumbs up button.
Our confidence scores estimate the likelihood that a particular pronunciation is the most correct for a given name spelling. These scores are derived from pronunciation dictionaries, manual verification, your feedback, and a fine-tuned large language model trained to generate name pronunciations.
For any given spelling, confidence scores across all identified pronunciations sum to 100%. However, these scores don't account for the possibility of valid pronunciations that our model hasn't identified.
The raw pronunciations shown (like D EH1 K S T ER0) use the ARPAbet phoneme system, a standardized way to represent English speech sounds. Each symbol represents a distinct sound in American English. Visit the ARPAbet Wikipedia page to learn more about these phonetic symbols.
Pronunciation audio is generated by an open source text to speech model that has been customized to adhere to pronunciations provided in ARPAbet format, but sometimes pronunciations that differ subtly will sound identical, particularly if the only difference is the level of emphasis on a syllable or a single vowel sound.
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